Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday October 28, 2011 @12:49AM
from the watch-where-you're-pointing-that-thing dept.

coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration wants you to go online to help it battle the growing safety problem of people pointing lasers at flying aircraft. The FAA today said it created a new website to make it easier for pilots and the public to report laser incidents and obtain information on the problem which continues to grow by leaps and bounds. This year, pilots reported 2,795 laser events through Oct. 20. Pilots have reported the most laser events in 2011 in Phoenix (96), Philadelphia (95) and Chicago (83). Since it began tracking laser events in 2005 reports rose from nearly 300 to 2,836 in 2010, the FAA said."

This is something I would never do because, well, it's dumb and there are better things to do.

But I wonder how much of this is "there is a serious risk we could crash" and how much is "damn kids, we are pilots, FAA we are quite put out, use your quick-and-dirty-no-legislation-needed administrative law powers".

This is something I would never do because, well, it's dumb and there are better things to do.

There are definitely people in the world who can't find better things to do. Pointing lasers at planes is right up there with a long list of stupidity such as throwing bricks at cars from a highway overpass.

But I wonder how much of this is "there is a serious risk we could crash" and how much is "damn kids, we are pilots, FAA we are quite put out, use your quick-and-dirty-no-legislation-needed administrative law powers".

It would depend on the airport, the type of approach, how much human intervention is required in flying the plane, and the conditions. When a laser hits an aircraft it lights up the entire plane due to imperfections in laser design creating a diverging beam. The issue isn't the possibility to blind the pilot (which is next to none), it's that the cockpit would light up like a set of highbeams pointed at you on the highway making it hard if not impossible to see anything outside the window.

Okay, I followed your link (which wasn't really a link, by the way...), and this confused me:

A typical flash from a hand-held laser at 1000 feet lasts about 1/50 of a second. In the FAA simulator studies, the flash used was one second long. The animation above "splits the difference" by using 1/2 second flashes. We feel this is a realistic portrayal of how long a typical exposure might last.

There is a MASSIVE difference between 1/50 of a second and 1 second! And they're going to "split the difference"!!?

It seems to me like saying, "We're going to simulate eating rice to determine if it could be dangerous. An average serving is around 200 grains, so our simulator uses 3000 grains. Let's split the difference and test 1600 grains. Yup, looks like rice is pretty dangerous!" Well, YEAH, if you're eating eight servings in each sitting!

Not that I'm saying lasers don't pose some danger, mind you. Maybe they do, but this just doesn't seem like a very good-faith demonstration of that. I don't understand why they don't just record some of these actual flashes and show them to the public so that we'll actually see what the problem is. The fact that they don't kind of leads me to think that under just the right, extremely rare and fluky, circumstances it could cause an issue; but really, the danger is probably exaggerated to scare people into not doing it. Such is the problem with these warnings, it's hard to tell where it is in the spectrum (no pun intended) of warnings against stuff like texting and driving (very real and very dangerous) and stuff like using cell phones at gas stations (totally bogus).

Undoubtably from time to time pilots see people flashing laser pointers at them. They probably find it annoying. But it's not going to blind a pilot and make the plane fall out of the sky.

Agreed. The figures speak for themselves. If it was so dangerous you'd think that at least one of those 2700 incidents would have led to an accident. That you can have that many incidents and no accidents just illustrates how little of a problem it is for safety.

What most people fail to realize is that pilots in a typical aircraft don't see the ground. The instrument panel is far too big for that. You have to bank the plane or dive more than you normally do in order to see the ground, and then you only see it pretty far away.

What most people fail to realize is that pilots in a typical aircraft don't see the ground. The instrument panel is far too big for that. You have to bank the plane or dive more than you normally do in order to see the ground, and then you only see it pretty far away.

Let me guess, you have zero cockpit hours, right? I'm a pilot. If you can't see the ground, your seat isn't adjusted right, or you're in a steep climb (assuming no clouds). Sure, you can't see straight down (well, unless you're flying one

Indeed it is, although you have to stare at it for a bit to cause permanent damage.

However, if you do the math, you'll find that even a low-powered red laser pointer projects a beam that is as bright as the sun if you look directly at it. Higher-powered lasers, or even same-powered green lasers (the eye being more sensitive to green light than to red) are worse, often much worse.

$110,000 for a private citizen buying a 10mW laser pointer on Ebay without a permit.2 different pieces of paperwork and several weeks to get permission to buy one legally.

Do you think this will deter the sort of idiot that would point a laser at a plane for kicks? The sort of inbred cretin that has nothing to lose! No just honest people with legitimate uses for the things.

What is to stop people from simply purchasing a $50 DVD burner, removing the laser mechanism, providing a power source and appropriate optics for the required application?

I was tempted to purchase a high power laser before the import ban was put into place, but never got around to it. Fail to see how it can be enforced, at best it will bump up the costs so that only those who have the resources to manufacture their own will have them.

Nothing. Customs controls import and export, not use within the country. However, if you use such a device in a dangerous manner you will fall foul of state law. For example, in Queensland, Section 26 of the Summary Offences Act 2005 (possibly superseded, but you get the idea):

(1) A person must not unlawfully—... (c) direct a beam of light from a laser at or near a vehicle that is in the course of travelling;
in a way that endangers or is likely to endanger the safe use of the vehicle. Maximum penalty—2 years imprisonment.

(Vehicle includes aircraft) The Weapons Act 1990 and related regulations have recently been amended to include laser pointers as restricted items, and their use only need cause alarm in the target to be an offence (Sect 58). Sec

Yeah, but what you've done is make everyone who imports a laser for a legitimate purpose (astronomy teachers, et al.) but doesn't fill out form B710, and form B709B or B711, and then wait three weeks, a criminal. Whether or not he's prosecuted, receives a caution, or is ignored completely is now up to the whim of the authorities.

In general, this is poor public policy because, as the saying goes, "when everyone is a criminal, the authorities can arrest whoever they please." Making a common act illegal is o

The number of morons waving their lasers indiscriminately at planes is much higher.

Really? We're talking about thousands of reports here. And if one did the math on the cross-sectional area of the airplane's windshield as observed from the ground...I mean, you'd have to have an army of trained, laser-wielding morons out there.

My question is, what other phenomena might be confused for lasers as seen by a pilot?

I can only think of one incident when it could have happened, I walked out of my office in a large open plan lab and walked into what I thought was just a He-Ne beam that someone had 'diverted' from the optical bench at the far end of the lab down to another bench at the other end, by the looks of it now there was (probably) an IR laser down the same path.

Shouldn't you be wearing goggles if you are in a line of sight of anywhere a high power laser is being used?

I'd think it'd be pretty hard to accurately aim a laser pointer at a moving aircraft. I'm surprised it's such an issue.

Lol, you're joking right?

Maybe you're unaware that all those photons travel in an extremely straight line?and you just move that straight line until it intersects an airplane. I could drawa diagram, but it would look rather basic, with a straight line and all that./s

You might even see the beam of a higher powered red laser at night if the air has the typical "city airport" level of pollutants and the beam was directed at you. At 600-800nm wavelengths, there is much more forward scattering than Raleigh scattering.

When it comes to aiming, the linear velocity is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the angular velocity, a fact that anybody who has ever been involved in combat (or even anybody who has played just about any video game) can attest to.

Compare the following scenarios.

Scenario 1: You are standing fifty feet from a railroad track for a high speed train. You try to hit the engine with a baseball as it comes by at 150 miles per hour. You are unlikely to succeed.

I'd think it'd be pretty hard to accurately aim a laser pointer at a moving aircraft. I'm surprised it's such an issue.

The bigger question is how much of a problem is this really? Out of these "incidents", how many resulted in permanent harm or loss of life? That seems to be gleamed over while throwing numbers in the thousands around...

A tolerable rate would be something like one in a billion events leading to loss of life (one in ten million as the tolerable rate of serious aircraft accidents, factored by a finger-in-the-air one hundred possible causes). By the time you are able to count incidents resulting in permanent harm or loss of life it is many orders of magnitude higher risk than is tolerable. In aviation safety we try to prevent people being killed before it happens.

I'd think it'd be pretty hard to accurately aim a laser pointer at a moving aircraft. I'm surprised it's such an issue.

The bigger question is how much of a problem is this really? Out of these "incidents", how many resulted in permanent harm or loss of life? That seems to be gleamed over while throwing numbers in the thousands around...

Okay, I think you need to learn a bit about laser light. Laser light is VERY different to light coming from a torch. The whole point is that it does NOT spread out like a torch. I even went to the bother of googling you a link [howstuffworks.com] to a pretty easy to read webpage which explains the difference. Laser pointers do diverge, but nowhere near that of a torch. It is exactly due to this low beam divergence that even a low powered laser can still temporarily (or permanently) blind someone over a long distance.

One of the reasons they're called flashlights in the U.S. (where they were invented) is that when they were invented, portable batteries were so weak and incandescent bulbs so inefficient that they would literally flash on for a few seconds before dimming (presumably from hydrogen build-up on the wet-cells) then they would go out. We have the opposite problem today. Forget lasers, ordinary LED flashlights (aka torches) are now powerful enough to cause eye damage. Until the 1980s, nearly all flashlights

Laser pointers are tiny handheld devices that can be concealed or brought anywhere, so you'll never be able to track anyone down and stop them. If you're the type to actually get off on shining lasers at airplanes, then it's just going to make your day to see your latest venture reported on the website. I mean, when I see one of those radar equipped speed limit signs that tells you how fast you're going, I always end up seeing how fast I can get before I pass it. This is going to have the same effect on

when I see one of those radar equipped speed limit signs that tells you how fast you're going, I always end up seeing how fast I can get before I pass it

Where I live, they take automatic pictures and then mail you a ticket. Bad idea.:P

And on that note, seeing their latest venture reported on the website may make their day, but getting caught will absolutely ruin it. The UK are making great progress on identifying and tracking attacks [bbc.co.uk]. If the capture rate and the punishment are sufficient, they will eventua

When your potential culprit is a six year old child, your weapon of concern is bought for a few bucks at Wal*Mart, and you're dealing with thousands of incidents, I think it's pretty clear that you need a technological solution for filtering laser light, not a massive network of informants.

I'm thinking some kind of active film inside the windshield. Laser hits a flexible, transparent solar cell layer, which powers a flexible LCD layer that turns opaque. It should be something you can peel off from the inside in case there is a problem with it.

Absolutely. Given that these are lasers there are only a handful of specific wavelengths that need to be blocked. Last time I checked there was one really common green, two reds (a deeper red and an organish red) and a blue. Goggles, or even just light-weight plastic "safety glasses" with filters for those 4 most common frequencies should practically eliminate the problem. Perhaps I need to patent the idea...

Do you know what is involved in designing narrow-band optical filters?

Unfortunately there is no magic technology for this. Optical notch filters have quite high attenuation at all frequencies. Put 4 of those in succession, and you will have what are practically blackout goggles at all frequencies.

In Europe you would not be able to patent the idea because you actually have to present a workable technology. You might get away with it in the USA.

Right, let's further limit the vision of our pilots during takeoff/landing by making them wear goggles because some jackass thinks it's funny to try to crash a plane.

I wonder what the chance of dying from a terrorist attack is compared to that of a laser attack. Then again, the instant anyone posts such numbers the US will simply declare laser-pointer users as terrorists and the numbers go all wonky...

The trouble with attenuating lasers is that you still need to see. Green is where we have our best vision by far. Red is fair, and our vision in blue is terrible. That's why the green lasers are always the biggest problem.

Thing is, green is right in the middle of the spectrum. Most filters are high-pass or low-pass. It's quite hard to make a very narrow notch filter that won't take out a huge swath of your most important vision information. That's why there are different laser safety goggles for different wavelengths - if you're using a red laser, you break out the blue goggles.

Pilots can't afford to lose that much vision on final approach.

I think there are some technological countermeasures that can be taken. I'd add a telephoto camera to the front of the plane that can zoom in and take a few shots whenever the plane gets hit with a laser. Even if you can't make out their faces, you might get some license plates, or see whose back yard it's coming from.

I think there are also nontechnological things they should be doing. First up would be to take some cockpit videos using a camera with a nice wide aperture - real sensitive, like your eyes are in the dark. Show the runway getting closer, closer, then FLASH you're completely overwhelmed by green for a couple seconds, stop the camera down a few to simulate your now-desensitized eyes, and then go back to trying to land the plane, now much closer to the runway and somewhat disoriented. Then publicize the hell out of the videos and some people will get the message.

I think there are some technological countermeasures that can be taken.

Legal countermeasures are likely to be more effective. The government should regulate the ownership of lasers above a very low energy output. This is the way this works in Europe. In the US, you can freely buy lasers with a full watt of output, which is just ridiculously dangerous for everyone, including whoever owns them.

Given how bad something obvious as firearm regulation works in the US, i don't expect this to happen, though.

Why does it have to be passive attenuation? Just cover the cockpit windows with monitors hooked up to cameras which show the appropriate view. If a laser hits the camera, the monitor will white out for an instant, but it won't be blinded, and its brightness will be nowhere near that of the laser. And if a camera/monitor dies, you can just remove it from the window and look through it normally until you get back on the ground.

Do they track any of the stats regarding the pilots that experience these events? For example, pilots are supposed to fly at least 1000 feet above residential areas. In my area, we regularly have helicopters and small planes no more than a couple hundred feet above our houses and I have observed it is the same frequent offenders every time by writing down the (clearly visible to the naked eye) numbers on the bottom of the aircraft, when such numbers are present. I have attempted to contact local air cont

I'll promise that the airport was there BEFORE some developer bought the farmland and built your subdivision full of McMansions on it. He got a spanking deal on the land because it's near an airport and you didn't do your homework.

How about, instead of chastising the airport and pilots for your mistakes, DO YOUR HOMEWORK THE NEXT TIME YOU BUY A HOUSE.

To answer your direct question, yes, there is a rule. However, it does not apply during approach and landing, which is what you are talkin

I'll promise that the airport was there BEFORE some developer bought the farmland and built your subdivision full of McMansions on it. He got a spanking deal on the land because it's near an airport and you didn't do your homework.

How about, instead of chastising the airport and pilots for your mistakes, DO YOUR HOMEWORK THE NEXT TIME YOU BUY A HOUSE.

There was a much reported incident (within the industry, at least) in the UK where somebody tried that argument on somebody complaining about aircraft noise, and they got a response along the lines of "This house has been in my family since the eighteenth century. Your move."

Perhaps you didn't understand the bit about "However, it does not apply during approach and landing, which is what you are talking about." So for you the advice should be GET SOMEBODY WHO HAS A CLUE TO DO YOUR HOMEWORK THE NEXT TIME YOU BUY A HOUSE.

He is *NOT* breaking the rules. The actual rule says EXCEPT for approach and departure from a landing site, an aircraft must remain 1000 feet above a congested area. If he is flying from an airfield, he was on approach or departure. Therefore he can fly low because to be able to land you have to actually descend at some time. You can't come over the fence of the airfield at 1000 feet and expect to land.

It is not breaking the rules. The rules explicitly say it is OK. The problem is people buy houses near air

There's no wonder you only get voicemail and no replies. If you bought or rented a property near an existing airfield, the FAA is probably tired of it.

If you bought a property near a pipeline, then they will ignore you for that too, because pipeline patrol (who tend to use helicopters and light aircraft) have a bona fide need to fly low. Do your due diligence next time you look for a place to live!

If you don't like aircraft or aircraft noise, don't live in a house near an airfield. Aircraft must descend bel

Do they track any of the stats regarding the pilots that experience these events? For example, pilots are supposed to fly at least 1000 feet above residential areas. In my area, we regularly have helicopters and small planes no more than a couple hundred feet above our houses and I have observed it is the same frequent offenders every time by writing down the (clearly visible to the naked eye) numbers on the bottom of the aircraft, when such numbers are present. I have attempted to contact local air control authority types but I can't get any more than a voice mail. They are so loud that it shakes my house and I could certainly understand how those who are willing to take the law into their own hands might decide to do whatever is necessary to discourage the pilots from skimming the treetops in their neighborhoods.

First of all, you should report suspected violations to the FAA. A local FSDO handles complaints about low flying a/c.

That said, I've flown small single engine a/c years ago, from a very busy field. People would regularly complain about noise, and we tried to minimize it but sometimes it is not possible to do that - I certainly would not try a takeoff at anything less than full power. I tend to think that was preferably to them than have me barely clearing their roof; I also preferred having some extra clea

Where I work, we've got plenty of these [birchalls.net] things [birchalls.net]. We already report to both the FAA and the DoD's Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) at... Vandenberg AFB, I think it is these days. Of course, this is maybe 30,000 laser-pointers worth...;)

Just allow the pilots to aim for the laser. Evolution should breed these morons out./yoke Flying a plane should still be safer than riding a car if each and every pilot would actually do this, but I suspect there would be some complaining...

The light is already too diffuse at this distance, so a mirror would be useless. And you'd need tracking optics anyway. And as long as you need tracking servos, you might as well put a real 15W laser on it and fire it back at the offender. Blind him for a week. I think that'd be a cheap, good and easy technical solution, and a good comeuppance as well.

Website? Laws? Punishments? Forget it. There can only be a technical solution. Find some way to make planes impervious to this kind of attack.

I personally would not have a problem with it, that when someone is pointing a laser pointer at a plane and is caught, she is skinned alive. But since 'idiot' and 'asshole' is among the most common human traits, this would hardly cause a ripple in the gene pool and would do nothing to improve the safety of planes.

Another possible solution would be to forbid laser pointers. Good luck with that.

Yes, the pilots look out the windows. It's particularly important for smaller aircraft and helicopters which are both more likely to be flying closer to the ground than larger planes.

And it doesn't matter if they need to look out the windows or not because if the laser hits them the right way it will blind the whole cockpit. There are a couple good videos on youtube, if you want to go digging for them, of pilots demonstrating what happens when a laser hits the acrylic canopy of a helicopter. The light diffu

Don't pilots usually fly blind these days? Are they really looking out the window constantly when they're up int he sky? [I truly don't know]

At twenty thousand feet, yes, they mostly fly blind, and most of the time the autopilot does the flying. The pilot is there in case something goes wrong, and a couple of seconds of not being able to see the instruments is unlikely to be a problem. But hardly any countries let the autopilot land the aircraft (and last thing I heard -- a few years ago now) the USA is not one of them, so for all flights it's the pilot looking out of the window who takes it down the last fifty feet (and for most aircraft it's f

I don't doubt that this is a problem, but I'd like to know what the pilots experience is when this happens. Does the laser light cause the entire cockpit to light up? What kind of disturbance does it cause?

Depends on the particular laser, quality, build, color, power, etc.

Also depends on how clean the cockpit glass is at that spot it is hitting.

Laser quality affects the collimation at a great distance, where acheaply built Chinese green targeting laser has a pretty appreciablespread at landing altitude. At a half mile, my green dot is a goodinch or so, diameter.

That coupled with a bug splattered cockpit glass, would produce somepretty overwhelming speculars in the cockpit, also potentially strikingoff of other reflective objects.

Potentially worse would be a very finely collimated laser making itsway into the cockpit and having a specular reflection directly in thepilot's eyes. A suitable powered green laser would cause at best,temporary blindness. Total blindness while not common isn't ruled out.And that laser could get the co-pilot as well, easily. Just leaving theflight tech to land.

And this is on approach, 5 minutes or so to get squared or splatted.

I live in Phoenix, where the article mentions some of the highestincidences. And I can believe it. When I first got back into Real Estatehere, I attempted to draw a map of all the "noise zones" associatedwith aircraft here. I gave up as soon as I realized there was ZEROland mass in the Phoenix valley that does not have SOME air trafficat least hourly during flight traffic hours for the commuter airfields.7pm at night, I've counted 20+ planes aloft. Gets crowded up therewhen we have UFO's too. =) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights [wikipedia.org]

What's worse, west phoenix has all those hot shots in their F-18s,flying their practice sorties 4 at a time coming out of Luke AFB.Right... over... head. Sigh. Can't wait to hear the LOUDER F-35,since we won the bid. Hope they are deployed after I move.

I believe that the risks are a bit exaggerated. Yes, the laser beam is quite bright, even at long distances, but at a kilometer, the spot is about a meter in diameter for a laser with a cheap lens. At 1 mW power, that is about 100 nanowatt entering the eye, an amount similar to looking at the laser spot on a white surface from half a meter distance. Hardly something that will blind you, even at night.

Moreover, keeping the spot steady on a target, moving or not, is impossible with a hand-held laser. That w

It's not too big a deal for commercial aircraft since computers do the majority of the flying, but it can be dangerous for manually flown small aircraft.

This is complete BS. The only time a computer is flying a commercial aircraft during the landing phase is when the weather is so bad that you wouldn't be able to find the airplane with a laser.

The public has this myth that all planes are controlled by computers. I fly commercial jets for a living. The autopilot rarely goes on below 10,000 feet. The only time it's used during approach/landing is if the weather is bad. (This frees up the pilots for more important things like finding the runway).

I have personally been hit by green lasers three times on approach to major airports. Let me tell you, it's not fun. Fortunately, if you look away rather quickly you can move past the laser before you're in too much danger. (The average jet is doing ~150mph on short final).

Still, it's a legit problem, and anything they can do to put the fucktards who are doing this away is a good thing.

What countries would that be? Under European JAR regulations, we only need to do a few per year and they can be done in the simulator. There used to be a time where we had to do, if I remember correctly, one every six months or so in the actual airplane. One per month seems a bit excessive, though. O, and if a pilot has not fulfilled the currency requirements for autoland, he/she does not lose his flight certification but just cannot perform autolands in low visibility conditions. That means not being able

Don't pretend to know anything about airline flying, because you obviously don't. It's quite the opposite, actually: we (yes, I'm an airline pilot) only use autoland in very bad visibility conditions, or when required to keep our currency. You actually need to make a few autolands per year to stay current, but these can normally be performed in the simulator nowadays so it's not an issue anymore.

Almost all landings are manual. The last autoland I did (apart from the simulator) must have been about a year ago. Most of the time, we do use the ILS (which is just a guidance towards the runway, it's what people call "the instruments") but we do it manually while looking out the window as well. And we quite often make completely visual approaches too, although that's being allowed less and less due to noise abatement regulations (they prefer all planes to fly the same, well defined trajectory and only annoy the same people all the time).

Some companies ban visual approaches completely (except under special circumstances), but I don't know of any companies that use autoland all the time. It would be a bad idea anyway: in very windy conditions, the autoland cannot cope and its use is prohibited. Or sometimes there's a technical malfunction. In those cases, the plane can only be landed by a pilot. Would you then prefer a pilot who lands the aircraft every day, or one that only lands the plane a few times a year to keep his currency?

There's also this widespread misunderstanding that autoland makes things easier for the pilots. Believe me, it's actually more work than a normal landing with all the checklists and verifications we have to do, and the constant monitoring of a system that lacks common sense and might suddenly do weird things due to some system bug. Yes, that does happen occasionally.

You keep saying things like "shine the beam into the cockpit". That's not how it works in practice.

Most laser beams are slightly divergent. Some of the better ones will make a sub 1m wide dot from 200m away. But when you point it at a plane that's not at cruising altitude the entire plane lights up, and you'd be amazed how accurate people can aim a laser. Go out to the football field and try it. See if you can keep the corner of the posts lit up from the other side of the field.

I don't care if you are flying a piper cub or a 787 Dreamliner. Final approach and landing is the single most dangerous operation performed by pilots.

You are low and slow and the engines are spooled way down because you are using minimum power, just enough to keep the damn thing flying, but slow enough so that when the wheels hit the pavement you don't blow all the tires and shear off the gear and kill all the people on board. Unless you are shooting a landing into damn near zero / zero conditions ( and only a very few airports are equipped to do that ( no GPS does not do that ) the plane is most assuredly NOT on auto pilot there are people flying those planes. At night it is dark in the cockpit and has been for hours. The pilots pupils are basically wide open, so just imagine how your eyes are going to react when a laser hits that acrylic windshield and every little minor scratch starts sending light in every fucking direction. even if you don;t take a shot into the eyes the windshield becomes damn near opaque and the pour underpaid overworked tired bastard is now a couple of hundred feet from the ground and suddenly can see a god damn thing except for his glowing windshield. Nice scenario eh? I am making 150kts and sinking at 500 feet per minute, or 8 feet per second so at 200 feet i got less then 30 seconds to get everything right or your relatives coming to visit are going to be showing up at your house in a barbeque bag.

Please don't try an minimize this at all. Your post shows you at least have some sense of the problem.

Before I go any further, I am a pilot.
[...]
Final approach and landing is the single most dangerous operation performed by pilots

I have to say I'm surprised about that statement. Here I thought that being on final would set you up nicely for the landing; you'd be already lined up with the runway, most probably well positioned on the glideslope and more or less ready to take anything. Lose an engine and dead-sticking it down shouldn't be a problem.

I'd call take-off the most dangerous stage of the flight. You are just about the leave the runway, if you lose the power too many inexperienced pilots will try to make the "impossible turn

I've played some with both solid-state laser pointers and fairly low-power HeNe gas lasers, and I've just gotta say that my aim is terrible. It's hard to keep such a thing fixed on a non-moving target at a few hundred yards, and it's damn near impossible if it's moving at any great speed.

I do very well with a rifle, or at a game of pool, but shining a hand-held laser at a moving plane is a completely different story.

Unless you are shooting a landing into damn near zero / zero conditions ( and only a very few airports are equipped to do that ( no GPS does not do that ) the plane is most assuredly NOT on auto pilot there are people flying those planes.

This seems to be the direction in which the solution should be sought. If your sight is sometimes going to be under attack and preventing that is almost always impossible, then technical solution must allow a plane to land in zero visibility, and zero visibility must be enforced (transparent LCD dimming) upon cockpit windows to prevent attacks. I would be very surprised if military aviation doesn't have solution for that already.

There has been lots of effort put into this over the years, but the main problem is that the systems introduce new risks which can be as bad as or worse than those of having a human doing the landing, and the cost of managing those risks rockets the further along the landing/rollout/taxiing you try to safely automate. It may come, but it won't be for many years and the problem exists now.

Don't be ridiculous. Systems often break down (lots of different equipment failures can disable autoland), and you can't even use it in very windy conditions. In those cases, would you prefer to have a pilot who lands the plane every day, or one that almost never does? And even with autoland, we're always relieved to actually be able to see the runway. It's the single most important backup to a system that just relies on some electrical signals from the ground.

Do the one's from Dealextreme work? When I bought a cellphone from them it didn't. When I complained they refused to do anything about it. My brother-in-law lives close to their returns address in Hong Kong, and when he went there to complain they didn't have an office there and nobody had heard of the company. US$80 down to experience and I will not be using them again or recommending them to any of my friends.

"Lasers can take out ICBM? Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles?"Yeah, they can. Of course the lasers capable of doing this take up an entire purpose-built Boeing 747 and require an amazing amount of carious chemicals to work. Not exactly "hand held".

However, hand-held lasers can easily be powerful enough to permanently blind someone, which should be taken very seriously. No, you won't find them at the dollar store, but anyone can buy them (without a license) for a few hundred dollars. Suggesting some fo

Why don't they have cockpit windows that are specifically tinted to diffuse the laser light colors that most affect them (red and green). Similar to the glue on tints they have in cars. If it's tailored to specifically diffuse red and green it won't even have a huge affect on what the pilots can see.

Or the pilots could wear special glasses when landing that diffuse / absorb the light. Either way, both are potential solutions to this problem.

Until they try to land using VASI or PAPI [wikipedia.org]. Pilots need colour vision.